All this talk about the death of books. Quit griping and find a new path...

Publishers Weekly is covering a growing trend in online tie-ins to books, especially involving YA material like 39 Clues and, forthcoming from HarperCollins and Fourth Story Books, The Amanda Project. Click here for the full story.

We've heard much regarding the impending death of books lately. Old-schoolers fear their smudged pages will become bland electronic interfaces. Sales of "literature" is plummeting but celebs snag millions for memoirs of their rhinoplasties. What's an author to do when the writing apocalypse seems to have arrived?

Branch out.

My official prediction: in the next 10 years, we'll see those 300 pages wrapped in a cheap cover morph into a complementary element of a writer's platform. In fact, virtual creative entities like The Amanda Project will, in my opinion, become the norm. No longer will readers be limited to a 10-point font that creeps way too far into the binding for comfortable reading; instead, it seems that authorship is extending in a very logical and human direction.

Let me explain that.

We're not all good readers. I, in fact, am a very visual learner, which probably explains my crazy need to create a mental image of everything I'm reading, even if that's a story in the Economist about King Bhumipol of Thailand. When I finally sat down to absorb David McCullough's 1776, I was this close to asking my intern to read ahead and highlight the British and Patriot names with red and blue ink, respectively, so I had some other contextual clues besides McCullough's inadequate prose (sorry if you're a fan, but for all its hype I was really disappointed).

My point is that authorship can now breach a visual barrier that books alone cannot. Much of this has to do with production cost -- you can't publish a book with sporadically placed colored ink and expect the same profit margins. And sure, S&S created an elaborately illustrated version of 1776, but they could have just as easily created an elaborate interactive website that brought the reader deeper into the many simultaneous layers of America's history McCullough was trying to depict. For me, admittedly not a huge reader of histories, additional visual representations could have held me. More importantly, the book would have been more effective.

Whether fiction or nonfiction, writers should now consider the possibilities their work might have as a joint venture between the good ole book and the bright shiny Interwebs. Aside from these examples, take my client David Wong; his urban fantasy novel John Dies at the End was read by nearly 70,000 fans online before rights were acquired by Thomas Dunne Books.

Here's hoping more publishers are stirring up good things regarding web packages. Let the writing leave the page. The book will never disappear, but if we're going to get those Internet babies to pay attention to story, we have to reach them effectively. Web 2.0, meet the novel.